Voice Search Optimization

If you are trying to do SEO alone, you know there are a lot of things you need to be aware of in order to keep your site ranking highly. Having a mobile friendly website, quality content, social shares, branding, and high quality links are just a few of the most important things you should focus on for your website. Have you though about the impact that voice search will have on your optimization? Here we dive into a few of the things you should know to take advantage of when it comes to Siri, Cortana, and Hey Google.

Exact Match Keywords Are Not As Powerful

Google has introduced several algorithms that include semantic search. In a nutshell, Google is trying to understand the context of words compared to reading them traditionally left to right. If you were to do a search for Chevy Chase, Google is trying to understand if you are looking for the city in Maryland, or the actor who starred in Christmas Vacation. These context based searches are slowly deteriorating exact-match keyword search phrases, so you need to be proactive when it comes to your writing style, and create content based upon themes and context. Before this gets too confusing, lets try to give an example of how you would want to write your content.

In this blog post, we want to rank for the search phrase Voice search optimization. This may not be a great phrase to target as our keyword research has shown that very few people look for this term online. However, there are more than 2.6 million results on the world wide web. Here is a quick snapshot of our competition.

There are two ads at the top of the page, so that does tell us that there is some type of financial benefit for targeting this search phrase. What we want to do with our content, is create a theme around this search, and include related keywords on the page so Google has a clear understanding as to what we are writing about. We do some in-depth keyword research and review the search engine results pages. We find basic keywords such as search engine optimization, keyword research, local search, marketing, websites, online services, internet search, Google, advertising, click-through rate, online databases, and Web 2.0. We utilize these keywords to start to form our article and topics which we want to write about. We go back to our days in school of laying out an outline and incorporating some of these words into our content, H1’s, and images in our content. We basically start with the basics and then dig deeper.

Using Cognitive Science To Go Even Deeper In Keyword Research

I had to look this up, but cognitive science is the study of thought, learning and mental organization, which draws on the aspects of psychology, linguistics, philosophy, and computer modeling. In other words, I am trying to dig deeper into the meaning of the keywords I am trying to rank for, and include highly related phrases and terms into my content. I am ultimately trying to theme my content in a way that the computers will understand in order to rank higher on the search engine results page.

I could write more information on how artificial intelligence and software learning is shaping the information age in a way we have never seen before. I could go into more details about mathematical optimization, aggregation websites, word recognition, and the way electronic publishing is impacting the public sphere and smartphones have more impact public opinion compared to the conversation we have with our family and friends. Your smartphone is your own personal digital assistant, and the semantic web along with artificial intelligence should be at the forefront of your promotion and marketing communications you have with your audience. It doesn’t matter if Google releases a giant Panda, Hummingbird, or Penguin update, the behavior and intelligence of the computers reading our information will determine what percentage of our content is related to the main keywords we are attempting to rank for, and an internal score will be utilized for our index term.

What The Heck Did You Just Say?

If you were a little lost on the last two paragraphs, it is ok. What I was attempting to do was tie in semantically related keywords and phrases in an attempt to theme this page on Voice Search Optimization. To the consumer, it may have appeared a bit over the top, but to the computers utilizing Rank Brain, artificial intelligence, intuition, and information retrieval, I was just theming my content to the keyword phrase I am targeting. If this page has more semantically related phrases and terms on the page compared to all the others on the web, then this page is going to outrank those pages on Google’s search engine results page. The relevance is what really matters when you optimize for voice search, but also for regular search in general. Start thinking in terms of human-machine interaction, and the theme of your content. When you do, you start to rank for many terms compared to just one or two.

How To Use Voice Search And Semantics In Your Personal Content

Start thinking about the theme of the content you are delivering. Before you write your content, start with the one keyword phrase you would really like to rank for, and then come up with a number of related keywords for your topic. What you will find is that when you have a long list of keywords to use in your content to create the theme, you are able to write longer, more engaging content that your audience and web software will really like.